We at Inbound marketing University believe that consistency in messaging, or perhaps it’s better said as consistency in narrative, is critical to being respected in your marketing. People know what you do better when you don’t confuse them with mixed messages.

As you know, marketing and sales doesn’t come free, but having said that, one of the cheapest sources of new business is existing customers.

To be a top performing small businesses, it makes sense to invest 30% of your budget and 25% of your time on expanding your existing potential customer relationships.

For better performance of your small business, you must focus on maximizing your returns from existing customers.

So how can small businesses do this?

Two things are discussed in this post: 1) Aligning marketing and sales, and 2) Using current customers as a source a new business and new customers.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Create a well understood division of labor. Marketing generates leads, sales follows up, nurtures and closes. To make this easier, ensure your business has a common set of narratives that everyone knows.

The reason this is so critical is lead nurturing is where the two sets of tasks coincide. While nurturing leads is mostly a sales responsibility, marketing automation, which makes leads nurturing easier, is a marketing function.

The four important questions (from a marketing perspective) are:

Why are you in business?

What do you sell?

Who do you sell to?

What decision process do they go through in the course of buying?

Therefore your marketing team and sales team should work together from a shared view of your customer’s history with your small business. This means common access to the same CRM and Marketing Automation system.

Getting the two functions aligned is sometimes easier said than done, but the payoff of doing so is enormous.